The Five GRAPE-Menus

Most of the time, you will interact with GRAPE through the control panel. Have a close look at it: at the top there's a row of buttons which allow switching between the five menus (and an Exit button to leave the program):

This row of buttons will always stay there; it is common for all menus. The concept of menus mainly serves the purpose of saving space in the control panel; imagine a control panel crowded with all interactive objects at once!

Located at the bottom of the control-window are a copyright-message and a message-field with up to three lines for general use. Projects display their name, author and version string here, some routines print out a special use of the mouse-buttons, some other methods display their current or termination state. At startup it should contain the current GRAPE-version-string.

Pressing the button will give you an advice how to get context sensitive help where the programmers found it helpful: simply press Control-MiddleMouseButton over a place you want to get help for; after having read the message press to close the help window.

The menus are designed to fulfill different tasks:

Create and manipulate light sources illuminating the scenery. Their colors, directions, and positions can be influenced.

Edit surface properties. Surface properties define coloring and shading of surfaces.

Move, scale or rotate the scenery; this affects the current transformation matrix.

Managing facilities, which includes many general operations. This menu is automatically selected when you have started GRAPE.

Options menus. The project-specific environment is built up here.

Exit the event-loop (normally to exit the program).